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brimworks / lua-ev

Lua integration with libev.
MIT License
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Initial Async watcher implementation #7

Closed ekpneo closed 12 years ago

ekpneo commented 12 years ago

Hello,

First off, thank you for these bindings! I implemented an initial version of Async watchers. It's pretty minimal, but should suffice for some use cases. I realized I needed something like this for another project.

The only thing I don't like is that you have to have a reference to the Async watcher (and loop) to trigger it. Would be nice to trigger the loop and have it trigger any Async watchers in it. But then, the C API requires both the Async watcher and the loop, so maybe it's ok as is.

In any case, let me know if it needs tweaking or is just total garbage. :P

Thanks! -Ted

brimworks commented 12 years ago

The implementation all looks great, however I think the intention of async watchers is that they allow you to send an event to an event loop running in a separate thread... and lua-ev is definitely not thread safe. So, what is your use case for wanting async watchers?

Specifically, this is what the manual says:

http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#code_ev_async_code_how_to_wake_up_an

"Sometimes, however, you need to wake up an event loop you do not control, for example because it belongs to another thread. This is what ev_async watchers do: as long as the ev_async watcher is active, you can signal it by calling ev_async_send, which is thread- and signal safe."

Thanks, -Brian

brimworks commented 12 years ago

Since I've got no response, I'm going to close this pull request, but if you can explain your use-case a bit more, then I would be happy to reconsider.